Working with influencers is an increasingly common practice in marketing, and even more so for the travel industry.
Find out how to spot them and what strategy to adopt to work and collaborate with them.
How do you target travel influencers?
Finding travel influencers on the web mainly involves in-depth research using keywords specifically related to travel, tourist activities, and more or less precise destinations depending on your company’s offering (tour operator, travel agency, transportation service…).
On the one hand, you can launch a search via search engines, by typing a series of words such as “travel blog”, “world tour”, “trip to Asia”, “roadtrip to New Zealand”, and so on.
This type of search can lead you directly to the websites and blogs of these travel influencers.
On the other hand, you can formulate your keywords into hashtags, for example #voyage, #travel, #travelphotography, or even #Bali, to search on social networks, and especially on Instagram.
In fact, this platform, which focuses on visual content, is very popular with travel enthusiasts.
How do I know if a blogger or influencer is right for me?
Once you’ve spotted one or more travel influencers, make sure that the image they project and the messages they convey through their photos, videos or articles are consistent with your own.
To do this, spend some time following their posts and articles to get a clear idea of their content style.
This will also enable you to determine what types of travel they do and what their specialty is (a specific activity or continent, etc.), study the tone they use to express themselves (relaxed, professional, dynamic…), find out which platforms they prefer, and analyze the audience they’re targeting (age range, characteristics…).
With all this information, you’ll be able to know whether the travel influencer you’ve identified shares your company’s values, whether their profile corresponds to the type of influencer you’re looking for (photographer, hiker, young traveler…), and whether they can indeed contribute to achieving the objectives you’ve set beforehand.
Tips for working with a travel influencer
Interested in a particular travel influencer?
Interact with them on social networks and contact them privately to discuss your proposal, your expectations and what you can offer them.
For the collaboration to be optimal, it’s important that it’s tailor-made, that a relationship of trust is established, and that the different parties communicate effectively with each other.
Likewise, don’t try to change the influencer’s style or give a detailed list of instructions, but listen to his proposals, requests and constraints.
After all, he already has an audience that likes his content and whom he knows how to satisfy.
Finally, make sure you give him enough time and material to create complete, impactful, high-quality content for your company and its subscribers.
Check the influence of a travel blogger or influencer?
An influencer’s audience is not only represented by a number of subscribers, readers or registrants, but also and above all by the existence of real people behind the various profiles, as well as the rate of engagement of this community.
So, before contacting the influencer you’re interested in, you should first check that the subscribers are real people and not “robot” profiles, for example, by taking a look at their pages, and also analyze the reactions of these subscribers through comments under each publication, “likes”, etc.
There are also tools like HypeAuditor, which lets you check the influence of a blogger or influencer and determine the quality of his or her audience.
In fact, it was Guillaume Ruchon, a famous Youtubeur, who not so long ago produced a video describing the pitfalls of buying likes and “Fake” communities to develop partnerships with brands in the tourism sector.
